How Influencer Marketing Boosts Link Building and SEO

Whether you like it or not, the competition for attention – and SEO – has never been greater – and its not getting any easier.

That’s why you need to pay attention to your strategy and HOW you are going to cut through the noise.

What methods are you using to do so?

Today, I’m going to show you how influencer marketing can enrich your SEO, link building, help you reach new audiences — and cut through all the noise.

Regardless of the number of people you believe your current content strategy may be reaching, one of the amazing things about digital marketing is that there’s always an opportunity to reach a wider audience.

Always.

For many people, this expanding world of opportunity forms the basis of their marketing strategy, but although they have the right idea – they fail to understand which steps they can take to develop brand awareness and website traffic.

Though most people recognize the terms “Link building” and “SEO”, they often regard these measures as complicated means to reaching their brand awareness ambitions.

However, with the help of influencer marketing, sprucing up your techniques is as complicated as you originally thought.

Influencers provide connections between businesses and consumers that bypass the “industry” atmosphere and establish relationships on a more personal level.

But there’s more:

With influencer marketing, you gain access to new angles for your content, new audiences, and a level of true transparency that your customers are bound to appreciate it.

What’s Influencer Marketing?

In every industry, there are people who can be referred to as influential figures, authors, or personalities.

Whether you’re involved in fashion, food, entertainment, or business, somebody on the web today has built the relationship with your ideal audience that you need: to maximize ROI and improve your brand image.

Influencer marketing means reaching out to those individuals, and actively finding ways to utilize their authority in maximizing your search engine impact, and improving the relationship you have with your current and future consumer base.

Influence marketing may sound complex on the surface – but it is really a simple concept to understand.

It can be connected pretty closely to “word-of-mouth” marketing- the most trusted way for any customer to learn more about your product – and be convinced that it’s worth their investment.

92% of consumers will believe the recommendation of someone that they trust over any other form of advertising, and the benefit of influencer marketing is that you’re not just asking a friend to tell another friend about your product.

Instead, what you’re doing is asking that friend to share the value of that product with thousands of other people.

It is that simple:

Influencers are important because they can encourage your audience to take action.

Today’s consumers are savvier and more well-educated than ever before.

We live in a world wherein advertising is everywhere we look – leading to issues like banner blindness in our potential customers.

Because of this, businesses need to work harder than ever to be heard over the noise of their competitors, and influencer marketing can give them the edge that they need for that purpose.

Influencer Marketing and Link Building

Link building is a crucial part of SEO, and the process involves acquiring hyperlinks from other websites that can lead to your own.

A hyperlink, or back link can be used by search engines to crawl the web, and they are often essential when a search engine attempts to determine where a particular website, or page should be placed on the rankings of search engine results.

While there are numerous methods that webmasters can use in order to build links, SEOs tend to agree that link building forms one of the hardest parts of their jobs, and many marketing experts spend a great deal of time attempting to do it well.

Fortunately, if you’re beginning to think that ranking your website higher in the search engine is proving to be too much of a hassle – it may help to know that relationships appear to be the best, and most natural way of gaining links from authority sites.

Of course, relationships can’t exactly be built with the website itself – instead, your aim will need to be focused on building a relationship with the authority (person) behind that site.

As such, influencer marketing can have a huge impact on your ability to cultivate beneficial back links, and improve your SEO ranking – leading to better trust from consumers, and up to ten times bigger conversions.

How Influencers Create Backlinks

For a long time now, back links have been seen as a vote of confidence from third parties about the quality, and reliability of another website.

After all, users believe that if an authority website includes a link in their post to another domain, they must believe that the domain they are linking to is legitimate, and worthy of consideration.

However, in the past, many webmasters abused the value of the back link by purchasing spammy, low-quality links as a way of boosting their ranking – meaning that major search engines like Google have had to put more effort into assessing the value of back links.

We are all paying the price for their black hat methods.

While one of the main components of successful SEO continues to involve link building, updates in the current algorithms mean that people can’t simply obtain links from anywhere – instead they need to generate back links from respected, authority influencers who have content on their website that relates to yours.

By reaching out to influencers within your specific industry or market, you can obtain those relevant links without having to resort to black hat measures.

After all, influencers can develop back links in a variety of different ways, including:

• Sharing your website on social media (Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn)
• Allowing you to write guest posts on their websites that link back to your landing page or website
• Writing “unsponsored” posts that link back to your website in some way

Keep in mind, however, that any sponsored or paid links that come from an influencer’s site may be regarded a “paid link” by Google, and as such will not be counted towards your SEO ranking.

Here’s the deal:

That doesn’t mean that there is no value in reaching out to influencers and asking them to write about your product however – even if you do need to pay them.

Simply asking an influencer to talk about you may be enough to direct traffic back to your site, and ensure more people learn about what you have to offer.

Influencer Marketing Improves Your SEO

In today’s modern world, online search plays a significant part in the purchasing journey for many buyers in the United States, and indeed across the globe.

Around 89% of internet users rely upon online searches to help them make purchasing decisions, and as such, maximizing your SEO efforts can be the number one way to improve your success online, by generating increased amounts of traffic, prompting further conversions and building a better ROI.

• 93% of potential customers use searches in determining which company they should purchase from (Regardless of price)
• Over 90% of the click-through statistics taken from search results come from organic results
• Only a meagre 8% of the CTR (click-through rate) from search engines comes as a result of paid advertising efforts.

Using influencer marketing, you can impact those all-important organic search results by changing the way that your audience sees you on a deeper level, and improving your brand image.

Gets Better Search Results with Influencer-Generated Content

So how can you use influencers to boost your SEO, aside from link building?

Most brand influencers are well-known for creating content on their own platforms, via social media, blogs, videos, and more.

By creating content that mentions your specific brand or product, influencers can encourage the audience members that are in your target market to seek out your company and consider purchasing from you.

After all, consumers are more likely to trust peer content over brand advertising, meaning that influencer marketing will give you better results through reviews, guides, endorsements, how-to’s, and even content regarding personal experience with your service or product.

So what’s the bottom line:

Developing a relationship with the influencers in your market or industry means that you can encourage honest product reviews that show your company in an ideal light towards people who may be unsure about whether or not to give you the chance you need to shine.

Look at it this way:

For example, chances are that if you open a restaurant and don’t have any reviews, your customers may think twice before eating with you.

On the other hand, if your restaurant has a review from one of the most famous culinary bloggers around, then there’ll be a host of individuals desperate to taste your dishes in no time.

Wherever you have the opportunity to gather guest posts, or expand your social reach by posting guest entries on popular websites, take advantage and use it as a way to build opportunities for back links, and get your name out on the social sphere.

How to Reach Out to Influencers

This is where most people fall short.

Keep in mind that influencer marketing for the purpose of SEO, backlinks, and link building will only work if you know how to reach out to the right people in your industry – in the most effective way.

Now:

Simply contacting people that you consider to be authoritative and begging them to write about you or share links on social media is unlikely to get you the kind of attention that you want.

So, what do you do?

Instead, you need to find a way to research those influencers and reach out to them in a way that will help them to feel connected with your brand on a level that they want to share.

A mid-level influencer is usually someone with between 2k and 25k in followers, who can make waves for your business, but may not be able to break you out of anonymity on a global scale.

Once you’ve found someone like this, do whatever you can to make them feel special.

Keep in mind that a large percentage of the influencers with higher profile followings are likely to be approached by businesses on an almost constant basis.

After all, everyone is looking for the best way to capitalize on reach in today’s marketing world.

This means that you may need to have already begun to establish a face or a name before those influencers will even give your brand a second thought.

Making the Most of the SEO Benefits

At the end of the day, combining SEO strategies with influencer marketing, link building, and backlinks, is all about developing relationships.

Don’t forget that.

Not only does this mean developing relationships with the influencers that you want to speak up for your brand, but improving the way that you communicate with other businesses in your industry, potential partners, and of course – those all-important customers.

In order to get your influencers’ attention to begin with, you’ll need to focus on delivering quality experiences and content that people will want to talk about and share.

Fortunately, thanks to social media, the power in the marketing world has shifted to the consumer, which is why what people say about you online has become more important than ever before.

Remember that no matter which influencers you have access to, you’ll only establish a good brand image if you can prove to your customers that you have true value to offer them, so make sure that you connect with them on a regular basis, from as many different platforms as possible.

The more you do this, the less you’ll need to try to attract further influencer marketing for your business, as your company will have started to give people a reason to mention you.

Influencer marketing is bound to get even more popular in the coming year, so if you want to get ahead of your competitors and start making a splash in your industry, the best thing you can do is start using it now to enhance your SEO, and get link building.

1 Response

LinkedIn in my opinion is improtant. It has a great Google ranking. If you are on LinkedIn and clients want to research how valuable you are, they would most likely type in your name to Google. LinkedIn usually is the first 3 search results you would see. If you build a credible profile on LinkedIn, it becomes an automatic good word of mouth for you or your business.